From Jihad Watch / Posted by Robert Spencer

DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran is moving ahead with testing more
efficient uranium enrichment technology, a spokesman for its atomic
energy agency said on Saturday, in news that may concern world powers
who last month agreed a deal to curb Tehran's atomic activities.

Spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi was quoted by state news agency IRNA as
saying that initial testing on a new generation of more sophisticated
centrifuges had been completed, underlining Iran's determination to keep
refining uranium in what it says is work to make fuel for a planned
network of nuclear power plants.

Although the development does not appear to contravene the interim
agreement struck between world powers and Iran last month, it may
concern the West nonetheless, as the material can also provide the
fissile core of a nuclear bomb if enriched to a high degree.

"The new generation of centrifuges was produced with a higher
capacity compared with the first generation machines and we have
completed initial tests," Kamalvandi was quoted as saying.

"The production of a new generation of centrifuges is in line with
the (Iranian atomic energy) agency's approach of upgrading the quality
of enrichment machines and increasing the rate of production by using
the maximum infrastructure facilities".

Kamalvandi said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had been informed of the development.

Iran's development of a new generation of centrifuges - machines that
spin at supersonic speed to increase the ratio of the fissile isotope -
could enable it to refine uranium much faster....

Obama's National Intelligence Director, James Clapper, blatantly lied
to Congress last Spring when in response to a question stated the NSA
does not "not wittingly" collect information on Americans in bulk. The
lie was revealed thanks to American hero and true patriot, Edward
Snowden.

Proven a liar, Clapper now freely admits he gave the "least untruthful" answer he could without revealing classified information.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the original author of the Patriot Act,
says Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should be
prosecuted for lying to Congress.

"Lying to Congress is a federal offense, and Clapper ought to be fired
and prosecuted for it," the Wisconsin Republican said in an interview
with The Hill.

He said the Justice Department should prosecute Clapper for giving
false testimony during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in
March.

During that hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper whether the
National Security Agency (NSA) collects data on millions of Americans.
Clapper insisted that the NSA does not — or at least does "not
wittingly" — collect information on Americans in bulk.

After documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA
collects records on virtually all U.S. phone calls, Clapper apologized
for the misleading comment.

The intelligence director said he tried to give the "least untruthful"
answer he could without revealing classified information.

Sensenbrenner said that explanation doesn’t hold water and argued the
courts and Congress depend on accurate testimony to do their jobs.

"The only way laws are effective is if they're enforced,"
Sensenbrenner said. "If it's a criminal offense — and I believe Mr.
Clapper has committed a criminal offense — then the Justice Department
ought to do its job."

Following this year’s further revelations on the NSA actively spying
on Americans’ communications, along with the president’s promise to
“reign in” the powers of US spooks, one would have expected that the
government would be engaged in a damage control campaign going forward.

However, this is the criminally insane military industrial complex
usurped government we’re referring to, so Instead they’re putting
world-eating Octopus logos on the side of spy satellites and tweeting
about it.

Here’s a photograph of the launch of NROL-39, the latest government
spy satellite being overseen by The National Reconnaissance Office,
which provides signals intelligence to the NSA, among other agencies.
The NRO is considered one of the “big 5? spy agencies.

Let's hone in on the logo.

The logo reads "nothing beyond our reach".

Obviously that includes Merkel's phone, and anything else the NSA wants to spy on.

The NRO claims "The octopus, is a versatile, adaptable, and highly
intelligent creature. Emblematically, enemies of the United States can
be reached no matter where they choose to hide."

To me that sounds like the "least untruthful" response without admitting what the symbol really means and what they really intend to do: spy on literally everything.

Anti-Patriot Act

The Patriot Act was anything but. It should be scrapped. James Clapper
should be prosecuted and spend the rest of his life in prison where he
can think about the true meaning of patriotism.

Meanwhile, those looking for a true patriot ought to stand up and
salute Edward Snowden. He risked his life, security, and personal
freedom to protect the US constitution. What's more patriotic than
that?

Is Obamacare Barack Obama’s Vietnam?

When
Vice President Lyndon Johnson returned to Capitol Hill after his first
White House meeting with the new team assembled by President John F.
Kennedy, he rushed to talk with his mentor, House Speaker Sam Rayburn.
LBJ told his fellow Texan how impressed he was with Kennedy’s “best and
brightest.” He was especially taken with Defense Sec. Robert Strange
McNamara, the ex-CEO of Ford Motor Company. Lyndon described that
“feller with the sta-comb in his hair” as being the brightest of the
brightest.

The bald-headed Texas politico, Rayburn, narrowed his eyes and looked
at Johnson over his glass of Bourbon and branch water and said with
some skepticism. “Maybe, Lyndon, but I’d feel a lot better if just one
of them had ever run for sheriff.”

We know that John F. Kennedy made some of the earliest commitments of
U.S. ground forces to South Vietnam, but their numbers were still quite
small when Kennedy met his tragic death in a Dallas motorcade. Johnson
became president and vowed not to order “American boys to do what Asian
boys should be doing.” That was fighting Communist subversion in
Southeast Asia.

Johnson carried that message into the 1964 election against
conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater. In that campaign, Johnson staked out
his position as the “peace” candidate and charged that Goldwater would
get America into a nuclear war. Johnson’s campaign used its own version
of a nuclear weapon on the hapless Goldwater campaign by running the
infamous “Daisy”
television ad. It was probably the most despicable attack ad in
history. But it helped Johnson to win a 44-state landslide and bury
Barry Goldwater.

Do anything just to win. That was the seeming message from the 1964
election. The very next year, 1965, President Johnson began his
escalation of U.S. forces in South Vietnam. The number of troops, most
of them draftees, would climb under Johnson to 525,000 men. LBJ was
sending more than half a million American boys, it seemed, to do the
task he said that Asian boys ought to do.

Thus opened up the yawning chasm of the Credibility Gap. Johnson’s
presidency was consumed by the Vietnam War. And Johnson himself soon was
reviled by his own party’s grassroots. In 1964, his huge picture had
been displayed over speaker’s rostrum at the Democratic National
Convention in Atlantic City. That floor to ceiling banner was as large
as many of those that were carried in May Day parades in Moscow’s Red
Square.

Just four years later, President Johnson was driven from office by
opposition among Democrats. And he dared not even show his face at his
party’s 1968 convention, that riotous affair in Chicago.

All of this was brought to mind when President Obama promised to
bring in “the best and the brightest” to fix his problem-plagued
Heathcare.gov website. Liberals in the media had all read the famous
David Halberstam book with its bitterly ironic title: The Best and the Brightest.

This extraordinary statement led even liberals to ask the pointed
question: If you are only now bringing in your best and brightest, who
did you hire to roll this thing out in the first place?
Congress—especially the House—will have its work cut out for it in
finding out who made the decisions to hire CGI and other failed
contractors, who decided to go ahead with the rollout, or tumbleout,
despite many warnings of trouble ahead.

Congress will also want to know what the administration did to assure
enrollees that their most sensitive health and personal
information—yielded up to the government under penalty of a fine—would
be protected. Recent hard experience with the IRS does not give anyone
confidence that patient confidentiality will be respected.

Will Edward Snowden be hired as an ObamaCare “Navigator”? Well, clearly not thatEdward
Snowden, the NSA contract employee who skipped to Hong Kong and then to
Moscow, hemorrhaging Top Secret information all the way. But what
guarantee do we have that the Obama Navigators will undergo detailed and
reliable background security checks to demonstrate loyalty and
professional competence? How do we know they are not hiring tomorrow’s
Edward Snowden?Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter
Peggy Noonan provides this picture of Team Obama’s “best and brightest”
young White House aides.

For four years I have been told, by those who’ve worked in the
administration and those who’ve visited it as volunteers or contractors,
that the Obama White House isn’t organized.It’s just full of chatter.
Meetings don’t begin on time, there’s no agenda, the list of those
invited seems to expand and contract at somebody’s whim. There is a
tendency to speak of how a problem will look and how its appearance
should be handled, as opposed to what the problem is and should be done
about it. People speak airily, without point. They scroll down, see a
call that has to be returned, pop out and then in again.

Maybe the first community that our Community-Organizer-in-Chief should organize is his own White House staff.

We’re not at Vietnam-level dissent and protest yet. It’s still early.
ObamaCare has only been bedeviling us since October. But wait. If we
see new waves of insurance cancellations, if there are more complaints
that the “back end” of the website is not fully functional, that it isnot providing assurance of insurance, if
it turns out that the information we are forced by law to provide to
Mr. Obama’s Navigators has not been protected, or worse, has even become
“a hackers’ buffet,” then stand by for trouble.

We should all pray the country doesn’t have to go through what we
only barely survived in the 1960s. Barack Obama may have forgotten the
violence and anti-Americanism of the radical left, but millions of
Americans remember it with painful clarity.

The loudest opposition to LBJ and his false promises about Vietnam
came from the left.

Conservatives did not go into the streets then,
burning draft cards and American flags. We cannot expect that
conservatives would ever engage in the kind of ugly disruptions that
characterized the anti-war left and its massive demonstrations,
bombings, torchings, and hateful rhetoric.

Still, the TEA Party is fully committed to opposing ObamaCare and its
threats to American liberties. Their ranks may soon be joined by
everyday Americans who were told over and over again: If you like your
health care insurance plan, you can keep it.

TEA Party activists may soon tell voters in the run-up to the
mid-term elections: If you like President Obama’s “best and brightest,”
you can keep them. It is still the responsibility of citizens to hold
leaders accountable. Perhaps Peggy Noonan is right: the real problem is“low information leadership.”

So far this year, a record 2,369 people have
either given up their American passports or surrendered their green
cards after long-term residency in the United States.

That is a 33 percent increase from the previous
record set in 2011, when the Treasury Department published the names of
1,781 people who had given up their citizenship or green cards, and this
year's total is likely to rise before year's end.

The chief reason cited for Americans renouncing their citizenship: avoiding U.S. taxes.

Unlike many other nations, the United States
taxes people based on citizenship, not on residency. So Americans who
move out of the country still have to file with the IRS.

Andrew Mitchel, a tax lawyer in Connecticut,
attributes the increasing numbers of expatriates to "the IRS cracking
down on people with overseas accounts."

He told CNBC: "All this publicity has really made
people more aware of these U.S. tax obligations and all the penalties
that can go along with not filling out the forms," which can be large
enough to bankrupt an overseas American.

Renouncing U.S. citizenship not only removes the
obligation to file with the IRS and pay U.S. taxes, it also solves a
common problem for Americans living overseas.

"They don't want to tell foreign banks that
they're an American, because the banks often don't want American money
in the bank," said Robert Wood, a San Francisco-based attorney.

That's because a law requires American taxpayers
to report information about certain foreign financial accounts and
offshore assets, according to CNBC. And it requires foreign banks to
register with the IRS and report information about accounts held by
American taxpayers.

There is a potential downside to renouncing
American citizenship, however. Those who do must obtain a visa to come
back to the United States, and there is a risk the U.S. government will
not let them in.

The Reed Amendment, introduced by then-Rep. Jack
Reed, D-R.I., and enacted in 1996, states: "Any alien who is a former
citizen of the United States who officially renounces United States
citizenship and who is determined by the Attorney General to have
renounced United States citizenship for the purpose of avoiding taxation
by the United States is inadmissible."

But people are not required to state why they are
renouncing their citizenship, and Mitchel said to his knowledge the law
has never been enforced.

The discovery of massive oil deposits in
Australia could shake up the world's energy industry and threaten OPEC's
grip on oil markets.

Australia's Linc Energy has released reports,
based on exploration near the remote town of Coober Pedy in South
Australia, estimating the amount of oil in the untapped Arckaringa Basin
could range to as high as 233 billion barrels.

That could turn Australia from an oil importer into a large-scale exporter.

Estimates of 233 billion barrels are just 30
billion fewer than the estimated reserves in Saudi Arabia, 263 billion
barrels. They are more than in Venezuela (211 billion barrels), Canada
(175 billion), Iran (137 billion), and Iraq (115 barrels), and could be
worth more than $20 trillion.

The discovery isn't fresh news, however — reports
about Coober Pedy's potential date back to January 2013. The news is
that there hasn't been more news about the find, according to oil
industry adviser Dr. Kent Moors, Ph.D., who thinks the discovery could
be even larger than estimated.

"The find may land at 300 or 400 billion barrels,
making it one of the greatest unconventional oil discoveries any of us
will see in our lifetime," said Moors, a professor in the Graduate
Center for Social and Public Policy at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh
and founder and editor of the Oil & Energy Investor newsletter.

"It represents a bona-fide redrawing of the
global energy map as we know it, and the mainstream media is completely
ignoring it."

He calls the discovery "the death knell for OPEC"
and a "death blow for Saudis," predicting that Australia could become
"one of the world's biggest oil exporters."

Linc Energy managing director Peter Bond told
Australia's Herald Sun that the company plans to drill up to six
wells to confirm the estimates of shale oil deposits, adding that "it's
one of the key prospective territories in the world at the moment."

Saudi Arabia and the rest of OPEC are already
threatened by the shale oil boom in the United States, which has reduced
America's dependence on foreign oil.

Back in July, Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed
bin Talal warned in a letter to Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi and
others that "America and some Asian countries made big discoveries in
shale gas extraction which will affect the oil industry around the world
in general and Saudi Arabia in particular."

Op-ed:Obama and the Constitution…like oil and water the two don't mix By: Diane Sori

“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of
President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability,
preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

And so those words were (unfortunately) sworn to by Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

We all know the ObamaCare roll out complete with its joke of a website was a nightmare in every way
possible…and continues to be so as band-aide fixes NEVER work...for in this case it still leaves millions without health
insurance due to cancellation, which in turn then forces them to buy much more
expensive insurance...sometimes double or even triple what the policy
holder was paying before being cancelled. And we all know that Obama
has made unilateral changes to ObamaCare (the anything but Affordable
Care Act) after it was voted on, adopted, and put into law. And that is
a major no-no as according to the Constitution changes made to a
law…any law…must go through Congress meaning NO president has the power
to unilaterally change a law by their own volition.

In fact during recent hearings about ObamaCare, Representative Bob
Goodlatte (R-VA) asked Professor Jonathan Turlet (a professor from the
George Washington University Law School) the impacts of those unilateral
changes Obama made to ObamaCare.

His reply:”The problem with what the president is doing is that he’s
not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He’s becoming
the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid.”

And so, Obama’s in-your-face casting aside of our rule of law strikes
deep into the very heart of our nation’s life blood…the US
Constitution…for the Constitution says in Article II Section 3, the
president has a “duty, not a discretionary power” to “take Care that the
Laws be faithfully executed,” meaning the main responsibility of the
President is to make sure laws passed are rightfully implemented. So
when Obama tells all that he will NOT enforce ‘certain’ provisions and
‘certain’ provisions alone…as in the suspension of the employer mandate
where ObamaCare is being delayed for one year for certain business
entities…he is most assuredly violating the Constitution because he has
NO right refusing the enforcement of a democratically voted upon, signed by him, and
now enacted law…in this case Congressional Joint Resolution #45 (forever
known as ObamaCare) passed in July 2010.

And we all know Obama’s tampering with this law is for political fodder
alone…as his fear of having
both big and small businesses turning against both him and the party
with the mid-terms coming up in 11 months is all apparent…and as employers start sending
out health insurance cancellation notices to employees during this
upcoming year believe me they will start turning against him.

Bottom line…with the ObamaCare law as passed mandating that both
individuals and businesses... meaning any business with 50 or more
full-time employees…be in possession of health insurance for themselves
and their dependents or face paying a penalty…Obama is taking unilateral
action in the implementation of ObamaCare…as in NOT applying the law
equally to both individuals and businesses. And in doing so Barack HUSSEIN Obama is
violating both his constitutional oath of office and his constitutional
duty to faithfully execute the law. Remember, the Constitution
authorizes the President to propose and veto legislation but does NOT
authorize the President to change existing laws…and Obama’s action in 'selectively enforcing' this law puts him extremely close to being a dictator…or thinking
that he is already one.

And by the way, even if Obama were to change and delay the individual
mandate the same way he changed and delayed the employer mandate clause,
that also would be a violation of the Constitution for again, that is
NOT how the law was written and passed.
With that, Congress must demand in NO uncertain terms that Obama enforce
Congressional Joint Resolution #45…his oh-so-wanted signature piece of legislation…as
written and passed or use his refusal as grounds for impeachment…and then after
he’s impeached repeal the whole damn thing.

The big question is…will they…but being the known gutless wonders
that they are I would NOT hold my breath for it especially with Obama
claiming the delay is a ‘sensible adjustment to phase-in enforcement,
not a refusal to enforce’…a ‘course correction’ if you will. And we all know
Obama will probably talk his way out of this predicament as he's done with all the others he's faced, as he has a
way of making those who oppose him back down in their opposition or to
take the fall or him.

“I have the power and I will use it in defense of the middle class,”
Obama has said on numerous occasions. “We’re going to do everything we
can, wherever we can, with or without Congress.”

And with those words…fighting words actually…that is exactly what Barack
HUSSEIN Obama is doing by changing the ObamaCare law as passed by
Congress. Knowingly and with malice this most miserable of
presidents…this most Constitution trampling of presidents…is making
those in Congress both irrelevant and a laughing stock as he bulldozes
over the very ones whose job it is to be the voice of ‘We the People’…a
voice that this administration has for all intents and purposes
silenced, for sadly we have a president who does NOT believe in our
representative form of government...or in the Constitution itself.

And unfortunately, we also have a current Congress that looks away and continues to allow this to happen.

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I am an American Patriot...part of the grassroots movement of bloggers spreading the truth the media will not. I am also co-host with Craig Andresen of RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS on RSP Radio at: https://streamingv2.shoutcast.com/right-side-patriots